TheCadets have won the St. Petersburg elections. They
have secured the election of 151 electors in 11 districts.
The Left bloc has won in one district only—the Vyborg
District—and has secured the election of 9 electors out of 160.
The outstanding features of the elections in St. Petersburg are: an
increase in the percentage of those voting in
nearly all districts, and the weakening of the Rights. The
Cadets are at the top of the list, with 28,798 votes (counting
the maximum numbers of votes cast for their candidates).
The Left bloc takes second place, with 16,703 votes; the
Octobrists come third, with 16,613 votes, the monarchists
fourth with 5,270 votes.

This,when compared with Moscow, is a big step forward. One district has been
won. The Lefts have advanced from third to second place in the list. In Moscow,
the votes cast for the Left bloc amounted to 13 per cent. The St. Petersburg
figure was nearly twice as high, i.e., 25 per cent.

This,of course, was partly due to somewhat more extensive
agitation, and to the political influence of the Duma general
elections, which were far more favourable to the Left than had been
expected. In Moscow not a single daily newspaper published lists of
the Left bloc electors. In St. Petersburg several papers did so: it is
said that Tovarishch has even increased its circulation very
considerably since it “swung to the Left”. In Moscow there
were no information bureaus to help Left voters to fill in their
ballot papers. In St. Petersburg there were. In Moscow most of the
petty-bourgeois townspeople believed the Cadet fable about the
Black-Hundred danger. In St. Petersburg there were
already unmistakable signs that this credulity of the petty bourgeoisie and the
opportunists had been shaken.

Hereare the returns for each ward, taking in each case the maximum number of
votes for the candidates on the respective election lists (figures taken from
Rech).

Wards in the City of St. Petersburg

Highest vote for:

Difference between Cadet Left votes

Number of votes we had to gain from Cadets to win

Cadets

Left bloc

Octob- rists

Monarch- ists

Spassky

3,397

1,644

1,514

624

—1,753

877

Narva

2,377

1,643

1,326

307

— 734

368

Liteiny

2,776

919

2,153

667

—1,857

929

Kolomna

1,318

1,122

1,068

236

— 196

99

Vasilyevsky Ostrov

2,313

1,949

2,102

418

— 364

183

Rozhdestvensky

2,784

1,325

1,195

537

—1,459

730

Kazan

1,749

589

998

201

—1,160

581

Admiralty

955

249

725

196

— 709

355

Moscow

4,100

1,702

2,233

706

—2,398

1,200

Alexander-Nevsky

2,735

1,421

799

588

—1,314

658

Petersburg

3,282

2,754

1,851

541

— 528

265

Vyborg

1,012

1,389

649

249

+ 377

–

Total

28,798

16,703

16,613

5,270

Total for five not hopeless wards, 1,573

Thesereturns enable us to draw a number of interesting conclusions.

Firstof all, about the “Black-Hundred danger”. The elections have
proved that it was non-existent. Our repeated declarations and warnings,
reiterated by all Bolshevik publications, including Ternii
Truda[1]
and Zreniye,[2] have been fully confirmed.

TheBlack Hundreds could not have won in St. Peters burg, no matter
how the votes had split between the Cadets and the Lefts!

Moreover,even if the Octobrists and the monarchists
???I
joined forces (an impossibility, especially in St.
Petersburg, where the German Octobrists in the Vasilyevsky Ostrov District were
on the point of quarrelling even with the Union of October Seventeenth), the
Black Hundreds could not have won in St. Petersburg! This will be
obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to make a very simple calculation from
the figures given above. The total Cadet and Left vote (45,500) is more than
twice the total Octobrist and monarchist vote (22,000). No conceivable
distribution of votes among these four election lists, no “measures”
taken by the Rights, could have created a Black-Hundred danger.

Thepetty bourgeoisie—the Narodniks and the opportunist
Social-Democrats—who caught up the Cadets’ outcry about the Black-Hundred
danger, were deceiving the people. We said so before the elections. The
elections have proved that we were right.

Thespinelessness and political short-sightedness, characteristic of the
petty-bourgeois intellectuals and philistines have revealed themselves in
practice in St. Petersburg. Though not nearly to the same extent as in Moscow,
the St. Petersburg elections were, nevertheless, elections by philistines,
scared and deceived by the Cadets. All the election literature published
in St. Petersburg, from Rech to Tovarishch, which latter
faint-heartedly defended the Left bloc (apologising for its Left sympathies?),
teems with evidence that the Cadets and their henchmen scared the man in the
street with a phantom of their own invention— the possibility of a
Black-Hundred danger arising out of the voting.

TheCadets strove to ward off the danger threatening them from the Left, with an
outcry about the Black-Hundred danger, while they themselves waited on
Stolypin, and promised that they would be reasonable, become more loyal, and
keep away from the Lefts. Stolypin himself has admitted, according to
today’s Tovarishch (February 9), that he knows something
about this Cadet swing to the Right!

Further,the St. Petersburg election results enable us to answer the
question—what have we gained from these elections? Has our straightforward
anti-Cadet propaganda succeeded in rousing new sections of hitherto
indifferent voters and drawing them into political life? To what ex
tent have we alienated the petty bourgeoisie from the liberals in
whose wake they followed, and won them over to the proletariat?

Toenable us to judge, let us first of all compare the Cadet and the Left votes (the maximum, as before) in 1906 and in
1907.

Number of Votes (Maximum)

Wards in the City of St. Petersburg

1906

1907

Difference between last and first columns

Cadets

Cadets

Lefts

Together

Spassky

5,009

3,397

1,644

5,041

+ 32

Narva

3,578

2,377

1,643

4,020

+ 442

Liteiny

3,767

2,776

919

3,695

— 72

Kolomna

2,243

1,318

1,122

2,440

+ 197

Vasilyevsky Ostrov

3,777

2,313

1 ,949

4.262

+ 485

Rozhdestvensky

3,393

2,784

1,325

4,109

+ 716

Kazan

2,242

1,749

589

2,338

+ 96

Admiralty

1,553

955

246

1,201

— 352

Moscow

5,124

4,100

1,702

5,802

+ 678

Alexander-Nevsky

2,991

2,735

1,421

4,156

+ 1,165

Petersburg

4,946

3,282

2,754

6,036

+ 1,090

Vyborg

1,988

1,012

1,389

2401

+ 413

Total

40,611

28,798

16,703

45,501

+ 4,890

Thesefigures very clearly reveal the proportion of votes cast in 1906 and 1907
for the opposition and for the revolution. Of the seventeen thousand votes we
polled (in round figures), we captured about twelve thousand from the
Cadets and attracted live thousand from the hitherto indifferent
(partly boycotting) masses.

Whatstrikes one at once is the difference between the “hopeless”
districts, i.e., those where, apparently, we could not have won in 1907,
whatever effort we had made, and the districts that were not hopeless. The
principle “hope less” districts, for instance, were the Admiralty
and the Liteiny. Here, the preponderance of Cadet votes over ours is
enormous. What is it due to?

Thereason is obvious. The population of the first district consists of
government officials; that of the second consists of the big bourgeoisie (this
was pointed out before the elections by Ternii Truda). The
Social-Democrats, supported by the Trudoviks, could not have won where there is
no trade and industrial proletariat, where there is a preponderance of civil
servants. Even the number of voters who went to the polls in these districts
declined—no interest was displayed! In these districts the only
thing we did was capture about one-fourth of the Cadet votes for the Left bloc.

Atthe other extreme there are the districts that are not hopeless, where the
Social-Democrats, supported by the Trudoviks, roused a mass of new
elements, and roused the urban poor from their apathy and somnolence, to
political life. These are the Alexander-Nevsky and Petersburg wards. Here the
gain in
the anti-Black-Hundred vote, i.e., the Cadets and Lefts combined, is over
one thousand in each district. Here most of the Left votes are
new votes, not votes captured from the Cadets. The voice of struggle,
the voice of the Social-Democrats and the Trudoviks has awakened those whom the
unctuous voice of the Cadets could not rouse.

Inthe Petersburg Ward we had only to capture 265 votes from the Cadets for
victory to have been ours. Clearly, 265 added to 2,754 would have made victory
quite possible. And it is also clear that the urban poor in these districts, by
no means of the proletarian type—shop-assistants, cab drivers and small
householders—rose in favour of the Lefts. It is obvious that the appeal
issued by the Social-Democrats and supported by the Trudoviks was not made in
vain, that a formidable number of the inhabitants of these districts are capable
of going further than the Cadets, to the Left of the Cadets.

Inthe Alexander-Nevsky Ward the struggle was in comparably more difficult. To
win there we would have had to capture 658 votes from the Cadets. Six hundred
and fifty-eight in addition to 1,421 is rather a big figure, but still it is
less than half. We have no right to regard as hopeless those districts
in which we could have been victorious had we obtained fifty per cent more votes
than we actually did.

TheKolomna Ward could easily have been won: all we had to do was to capture 99
votes from the Cadets. In the Vasilyevsky Ostrov Ward, where the three
main lists—Cadet, Octobrist and Left—each polled about an
equal number of votes, we could have won if we had captured 183 votes
from the Cadets. In the Narva Ward we could have won if we had captured
368 votes from the Cadets.

Tosum up: the Left bloc in St. Petersburg undoubtedly won over to its
side the shop-assistants and the urban petty bourgeoisie, roused a
section of them to political life for the first time, and captured a
very considerable section of them from the Cadets.

Thehopeless and despondent opinion that Social-Democratic ideas are
unintelligible to trade and industrial office employees in the intermediary
stage when the Trudoviks support the socialists, has been fully refuted
by the St. Petersburg elections. If we want to and set about it properly, we
can rouse for the political struggle hundreds and thousands of
the urban poor in every district in the capital. We can win, in every
district, hundreds of shop-assist ants, clerks, etc., from the party of
the bourgeois liberals who are bargaining with Stolypin. If we work tirelessly
in that direction, the influence of the treacherous Cadets over the urban poor
will be broken. The Cadets will not survive another election struggle
against the Left bloc in St. Petersburg! They will be completely routed under
the present electoral law, if they go into battle again after months of
“Stolypin” agitation and Milyukov haggling!

Indeed,it is obvious that even in the present elections the Left bloc needed
very little more to achieve a victory. The only hopeless districts were the
Admiralty, Liteiny, Spassky, Rozhdestvensky, Kazan and Moscow. In these six
districts we needed over fifty per cent more votes than we received in
order to win, and this was hardly conceivable, however strenuously we might
have conducted election agitation, distributed literature, etc. (or, rather, it
was conceivable, but not under Stolypin’s military-court manner of
conducting free elections!). The first two of these districts were socially
inaccessible to the Social-Democrats and the Trudoviks. The other four were
accessible,
but our activities among the trade and industrial office employees in
those districts were still far too feeble.

Wecaptured one of the remaining six districts the first time we contested it as
a Left bloc. In four we were from 99 to 368 votes short of capturing them from
the Cadets. In one we were 658 votes short. We had only to capture 1,573
votes from the Cadets, in these five districts, and the Left bloc would
have been victorious, would have won the whole of St. Petersburg!

Itis doubtful whether anyone will venture to say that it would have been too
much for the Social-Democrats to capture 1,573 votes in five districts if they
had worked unitedly, if the opportunists, who were bargaining with the Cadets,
had not procrastinated so long in forming the Left bloc, or if the
breakaway Mensheviks had not acted as blacklegs against the Left
bloc.

Whatis a blackleg? A blackleg is a man connected with the fighting proletariat,
who tries to trip it up when it is engaged in the collective struggle.

Doesthis definition fit the breakaway Mensheviks? Of course it does, for they
subverted the unity of the Social-Democratic organisation in St. Petersburg,
sowed discord in the ranks of the fighters, deserted to the Cadets at the height
of the battle, and lastly, deliberately obstructed us even after the
Left bloc was formed. Suffice it to recall that the Left bloc was formed on
January 25, and on January 28, the breakaway Mensheviks issued, in
Tovarishch, an appeal to the voters in five districts to abstain from
voting! On February 1 the same Mensheviks (Rech) published an appeal,
in which they tried to frighten petty bourgeoisie with the bogey of the
Black-Hundred danger!

Thatis not all. In today’s Rech, page 3, there is a report on
the elections in the Petersburg District, in which we read that one of
the ballot papers was marked: “I abstain from voting. A Menshevik.”

Letthe reader give thought to the significance of this! On January 28 the
Mensheviks published, in Tovarishch, the resolutions of the executive
body of the breakaway section. In Point VI of these resolutions, the
Petersburg District was excluded from the list of districts
where the Black-Hundred danger was supposed to have existed.

PointVI stated expressly that an agreement with the Lefts was expedient in the
Petersburg District. Point III stated expressly that even if no agreement
was reached with the Lefts the Mensheviks called upon the voters to vote
for the Lefts in those districts where there was no “obvious”
Black-Hundred danger. And yet a “Menshevik”
abstained from voting in the Petersburg District!! Then what did
the breakaway Mensheviks do in other districts?

Afterthis, how can anybody fail to recognise the fact that it was
blacklegging by a section of the Mensheviks that prevented the victory
of the Left bloc in the St. Petersburg elections, where there was no
Black-Hundred danger at all?

Letthe proletariat learn from the vacillations and treachery of the petty
bourgeoisie. We shall always be the first to unfurl our flag boldly and
resolutely. We shall always urge the petty bourgeoisie to throw off the tutelage
of the liberals and come over to the side of the proletariat. And these
tactics—the only revolutionary, proletarian tactics in a bourgeois
revolution—will bring us victory at every revival of the mass political
struggle.

Saratov,Nizhni-Novgorod—the first victory; Moscow,
St. Petersburg—the first attack. Enough, gentlemen of the Cadet Party! The
deception of the urban poor by the liberal landlords and the bourgeois lawyers
is coming to an end. Let. the Stolypins and the Milyukovs sneer at the
“red rag”. The Social-Democrats are standing at their post, keeping
the red flag flying in the sight of all toilers and all the exploited.

Notes

[1]Ternii Truda (Thorns of Labour)—a Bolshevik
legal weekly published in St. Petersburg from December 24, 1906 (January 6,
1907) to January 6 (19), 1907. Lenin was an active collaborator. All the issues
were confiscated by the police and further publication was prohibited by the
St. Petersburg City Court.

[2]Zreniye (Vision)—a Bolshevik legal weekly published in
St.. Peters burg during the Second Duma election campaign in 1907, with Lenin
participating. Only two issues appeared, containing four articles by Lenin.
Both were confiscated by order of the St. Petersburg Press Committee, and
publication of the paper was prohibited by the St. Petersburg City
Court.